I was chuffed to see one of my favourite blogs suddenly posted about “my” area , Cloud Computing.  Global Dashboard has this to say:

VoxEU explores the emergence of “cloud computing” and its potential impact on our lifestyles, business innovation, and economic growth. Charles Leadbeater assesses the associated rise of “cloud culture” and the importance of guarding this new space from the overbearing influence of government and big business. Elsewhere, over at Brookings Mark Muro wonders if the rise of Amazon’s Kindle could be a “symbol of American decline”.

Dear readers,

I just wanted to to wish you a very happy and prosperous new year.

Kind regards,

Jonathan

These are my links for May 28th 2009 through June 11th 2009:

• The dark side of Dubai – The Independent – Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.
• The Atlantic Online | June 2006 | The Management Myth | Matthew Stewart – Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead
• BBC NEWS | Business | Irish Republic: Boom to bust – BBC radio look at the complete collapse of the Irish economy and how the Irish emigrant is back.
• Why Things Become Unpopular – "Why is everybody suddenly wearing those new sandals and listening to that new band? It's so trendy!" A recent study has investigated this sentiment in order to understand why some cultural products and styles die out faster than others. According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.
• A List Apart: Articles: Burnout – "Web professionals are often expected to be “always on”—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an "always on" life can be debilitating."
• In the industrial economy success was self-limiting; – …it obeyed the law of decreasing returns. In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns.

These are my links for April 13th 2009 through May 14th 2009:

• Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time…What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
• The Three Poisons, Institutionalized by David Loy According – txtbin – According to Buddhism the three roots of evil are lobha greed, dosa ill will, and moha delusion. Traditionally these are personal problems, but today they must also be understood more structurally, as institutionalized.
• Management idea: Kaizen | Kaizen | The Economist – Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning, roughly, continuous improvement.
• Eric Hobsbawm: Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next? | Comment is free | The Guardian – "Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp". The worst thing about the crisis is that it has given respite to old socialists windbags. We were so close to them all having died out…
• Ergonomic Workspace Planner, Workstation Installation Tool – Follow the three steps below when planning your workstation. The values displayed will help you place your equipment for optimum ergonomic comfort. Also try the interactive Workspace Assessment tool to evaluate your current working conditions.

  Things to remember: Eye height should be level with top of the screen. If using bi-focals, lower the monitor and tilt the screen upward to avoid neck strain. Elbow height should be level with the top of the keyboard. Seat height should allow your feet to rest flat while maintaining a 90–110° angle at the hips.

  Values are derived without clothing allowances. Always add shoe height to figure proper measurement. Additional factors may apply. Consult with an ergonomist for more detailed information.

These are my links for March 25th 2009 through April 10th 2009:

• Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world – "Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a comment piece in today’s FT outlining 10 principles that might bring ‘economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.’
• YouTube – The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See – Exponential function and doubling time , hugely important but simple mathematical concepts vital to understanding our world.
• The Postmodern Financial Crisis by André Glucksmann, City Journal Winter 2009 – “It is true because we say it is” has run its course.
• 'Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests': Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity – Reason Magazine – If we continue to go on in the same way, our future is unsustainable. Of course, we never go on in the same way.
• Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » How Rich Countries Die – This is a book report on The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, by Mancur Olson. There isn’t a whole lot about how nations pulled themselves out of their medieval stagnation (see A Farewell to Alms for that), so a better title for this still-in-print book from 1982 would be “How Rich Countries Die.”

These are my links for March 15th 2009 through March 22nd 2009:

• Servant leadership – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Servant leadership is an approach to leadership development, coined and defined by Robert Greenleaf and advanced by several authors such as Stephen Covey, Peter Block, Peter Senge, Max DePree, Margaret Wheatley, Ken Blanchard, and others. Servant-leadership emphasizes the leader's role as steward of the resources (human, financial and otherwise) provided by the organization. It encourages leaders to serve others while staying focused on achieving results in line with the organization's values and integrity.
• Depression? Recession? No, It's the Great Restructuring — Seeking Alpha – It’s not a great depression, neither is it a great recession we’re going through now. At the Brite conference this week, Umair Haque called it a great “compression,” as an economy built on perceived value reconciles with actual value. This morning, The New York Times finally realized that what we’re experiencing is more than a financial crisis: “Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy.” Well, yes, if hints were sledgehammers. …what we’re living through is instead a great restructuring of the economy and society, starting with a fundamental change in our relationships – how we are linked and intertwined and how we act, nothing less than that.
• Community of practice – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – "The concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals."
• Crowdfunding – TIME – "Politicians do it. Charities too. And now for-profit entrepreneurs are tapping the Internet to get small amounts of money from lots and lots of supporters. One part social networking and one part capital accumulation, crowdfunding websites seek to harness the enthusiasm–and pocket money–of virtual strangers, promising them a cut of the returns."
• A nation divided by the recession – Home News, UK – The Independent – The worst recession in three-quarters of a century is threatening to divide Britain more painfully than ever. Younger, richer households are gaining from lower inflation, house prices and mortgage rates, but at the expense of older, poorer fellow citizens. They are struggling to survive as they suffer relatively high price rises and a drop in their incomes as interest rates on savings hit zero and they see the equity in their homes destroyed by the property slump.

These are my links for March 6th 2009 through March 13th 2009:

• Bad News From America’s Top Spy – Truthdig – We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgänger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington’s new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.
• The Color of China – The National Interest – China’s meteoric economic rise has created its share of admirers and its share of detractors, not to mention an equal measure of fear that Beijing may either succeed or fail. Can China harness the strengths of its economy for the good or will its deep societal ills rise to the surface? Pei argues that the effects of severe environmental degradation, an unruly populace and a diseased infrastructure cannot be underestimated. Anderson believes China’s GDP juggernaut will continue going strong. It may even break world records.
• Screen Recycler – Mac software that allows you to use old computers as extra monitors. – Use your other computer as additional display for your Mac. Recycle your old iMac, Powerbook or even Windows PC.
• The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy – A good post on a simple strategy for companies wanting to enter the "social" world of blogs, twitter, Facebook etc
• Sun CTO: Recession Fueling Interest in Cloud Computing, Virtualization – The global recession is forcing enterprises to look at such technologies as cloud computing, virtualization and green IT to find ways to cut costs and increase efficiencies in their data centers, according to Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos.It's now up to vendors like Sun and groups like AFCOM to give data center administrators the information they need on cloud computing to make the right decisions. As the recession deepens, demand for cloud computing and other technologies will continue to grow.

I wanted to share with you what I consider to be one of the best sites on the internet – syque.com – and its creator and maintainer David Straker.

Syque.com is an umbrella site that contains several truly brilliant sub-sites. Here is a sample:

ChangingMinds

ChangingMinds.org is already a huge site, with over 2000 pages on all subjects around how we change one another’s minds. Including:

• Disciplines: professions for changing minds.
• Techniques: practical applied methods.
• Principles: underlying ways that people change minds.
• Explanations: why it works.
• Theories: deep psychology.

CreatingMinds

CreatingMinds.org is a new site about creativity and innovation, with around 400 full-content pages. Including:

• Tools: A huge toolbox of creative tools.
• Quotes: Thousands of quotes on creative topics.
• Principles: Principles of creativity.
• Articles: More articles on creativity and creative organizations.

Quality Tools

Quality Tools contains about 600 pages, mostly on the tools and techniques of quality and improvement, including the full text of a major book and ten-plus years of journal articles.

• The Quality Toolbook: The full content of a 400+ page book.
• Tools of the Trade: Over 60 articles from 10 years in Quality World.
• Articles: Further articles about quality.

The Improvement Encyclopedia

This is a long list of around 400 items, each with a page containing descriptions of tools and terms about improvement and quality, ranging from original Japanese terminology to Six Sigma frameworks.

Along with businessballs, quality tools

If you want to keep up with what David is thinking and writing about, the check out his Changing Minds blog.

Steve O’Donnell discusses McKinsey’s recent prediction that datacenter carbon footprint will quadruple by 2020, exceeding air travel’s.

CIO and CTOs are in denial about this, but it is true, and one of the biggest challenges facing the industry.

Data Center emissions will quadruple by 2020 matching the volume of air travel. | The Hot Aisle

Jason Scott savages Cloud Computing in an entertaining if an little bit angry rant/manifesto

ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD